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The Hubble Space Telescope is turning 20 today, a venerable age for such an important piece of hardware for modern astronomy. Over the years, it has provided some of the most spectacular and famous images of our galaxy and beyond. Google is one of the geekiest companies out there, so it wouldn’t miss out on an occasio… (read more)

With GOM, you´ll experience something you´ve never seen in the past with other media players. GOM supports all kinds of features for highly advanced users who desire to watch video clips at the best quality. Try one of your broken AVI files with GOM that other media players couldn´t play.

GOM Player supports most of the condecs (AVI, DAT, MPEG, DivX, and plus more) by its own embedded codec system that you won´t have to look for appropriate codecs everytime when you can´t play a certain video format.

For those codecs that require license that cannot be distributed, GOM will automatically lead you to a open-source codec web-site.

Watch video files while you are downloading them! GOM has a registered patent For playing broken AVI format or AVI video files that are being Downloded. So try one of your broken AVI files or The one that you are downloading right now. You´ll find it amazing!

GOM support a lot of advanced features for advanced users. You can customize this players only for you by setting toggle keys for yourself select VMR modes, Set detail resolution. Overlay mixer features AVI key frame based RW/FF optimized buffer for streaming automatic ASF source filter and many more!

Note from FreewareFiles: The setup program includes a toolbar which does not have to be installed to use the software.

What’s New in version 2.1.25.5015:

• Modified source filter of MP3 local files

Homepage: http://www.gomplayer.com/
Download: GOMPLAYERENSETUP.EXE
File Size: 6.56MB

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A lot of disgruntled fans weren’t too happy with the Final Fight: Double Impact DRM, which requires players to be signed into the PlayStation Network to be able to play even in single player games. In

The Sony systems continue to show strength in Japan as the PSP and PS3 finish the week at #1 and #2 respectively. What about the others?

Twitter has been more active on the acquisition front lately, no doubt spurred by the huge amounts of cash it got from its investors. Another trend has been moving back to its SMS roots by signing more agreements with carriers. Put these together and you end up with Twitter’s latest acquisition, a startup called Cloudhopper, whi… (read more)

Modern technology has made life much easier with various portable systems that can easily be carried around. Although the market is clogged with various devices that are foldable, the personal mobility section has largely remained untouched by such innovations. Since bicycles are being anticipated to make personal transportation green in the future, as it did in the past as well, several designers are looking towards folding bikes that take up limited space and can easily be carried in the boot of your car. Here is a list of some of the finest folding bicycles that might transform personal transportation for ever.

(more…)

With FW 3.30, the PS3 is now ready to handle 3D gaming. But what about the games? The Digital Foundry reports that in order to support the 3D output, the first few games to support the feature

Jazztel anunció el lanzamiento de su línea VDSL2 con hasta 30 megas de descarga y 1,5 megas de velocidad de subida mientras que Ono aumenta la cobertura de su oferta de 50 megas de descarga. Todo esto mientras se enciende el debate por parte de las telecos de que si no cobran a las empresas de internet acabarán subiendo los precios y de sucesivos informes sobre lo cara y lenta que es la banda ancha en internet. Lanzamientos como este del VDSL2 de Jazztel y los 50 megas de Ono vienen a reafirmar que a poco que haya actores capaces de desplegar su propia red, tendremos un mercado mas dinámico y competitivo.

Disclaimer: Jazztel es cliente de Weblogssl, empresa de la que soy socio. Asimismo, otras telecos son anunciantes en nuestras publicaciones.

Más información: Banda Ancha.

Relacionado: La velocidad de subida del ADSL y el AnexoM de Jazztel, ADSL con internet móvil de regalo frente a las redes Wi-Fi

Heritage Key (Owen Jarus)

Heritage Key reported recently that mummified baboons in the British Museum could reveal the location of the land of Punt – a place to which pharaohs organized trading expeditions. To the Egyptians, Punt was a place of fragrances, giraffes, electrum and other exotic goods. It was sometimes referred to as Ta-netjer – ‘God’s land’ – a huge compliment given that the Ancient Egyptians tended to view outside cultures with disdain.

Although Egyptians record voyaging to it until the end of the New Kingdom, 3,000 years ago, scholars do not know where Punt was. Ancient texts offer only vague allusions to its location and no ‘Puntite’ civilization has yet been discovered. Somalia, Ethiopia, Yemen and even Mozambique have all been offered as possible locations.

Thanks to some cutting edge science, the search for Punt appears to be coming to an end. New research, to be presented at an Egyptology conference today, provides proof that it was located in Eritrea/East Ethiopia.

See the above page for the full story.

Found under: BlackBerry, Symbian, Google, Reader, ,

Just a few days ago I showed you this simple and very efficient Symbian application called RssNews which helps you follow your favorite feeds on your Nokia smartphone. Today I found a similar application for your BlackBerry smartphone called Unread.Unread is basically a Google Reader client which will help you integrate your favorite reader with your favorite BlackBerry smartphone and stay atop of the news. All you have to do is get the app login and start reading away just as you wo

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Found under: Sprint, Contest, HTC, EVO 4G, ,

Sprint has already started advertising its first and only for that matter WiMAX Android smartphone. I am talking about the HTC EVO 4G of course a remarkable device which will hit stores at some point in June. In the mean time Sprint Premier customers are given the opportunity of winning 10 HTC EVO 4G devices well ahead the smartphone hit the streets. The contest is open to Sprint Premier customers only and they will be able to submit their entry by 9 May 2010. The lucky 10 win

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Thanks to everyone who sent links for this story.

Boston Globe

Archaeologists unearthed 383 bronze coins dating back to King Ptolemy III who ruled Egypt in the 3rd century B.C. and was an ancestor of the famed Cleopatra, the Egyptian antiquities authority announced Thursday.

The statement said one side of the coins were inscribed with hybrid Greek-Egyptian god Amun-Zeus, while the other side showed an eagle and the words Ptolemy and king in Greek.

Founded by one of Alexander the Great’s generals, the Ptolemaic Dynasty ruled Egypt for some 300 years, fusing Greek and ancient Egyptian cultures.

The coins were found north of Qarun lake in Fayoum Oasis 50 miles (80 kilometers) southwest of Cairo.

Other artifacts were unearthed in the area included three necklaces made of ostrich egg shell dated back to the 4th millennium B.C. and a pot of kohl eyeliner from the Ottoman Empire.

Inquirer.net

The 383 items dating back more than 2,250 years were found near Lake Qarun in Fayum oasis, around 120 kilometers (75 miles) from Cairo, the ministry said in a statement, adding that they were in excellent condition.

The coins weighed 32 grams (1.12 ounces) each, with one face depicting the god Amun and the other the words “king” and “Ptolemy III” in Greek along with his effigy, the statement said.

Other objects from different periods were also found during the dig, in addition to parts of a whale skeleton around 42 million years old, it added.

The ministry said it was the first time Egyptian archaeologists had found necklaces made from ostrich eggshell at Fayum.

Fox News

With photographs.

The Guardian has an excellent article questioning the widely cited statistic that ‘1 in 4’ people will have a mental illness at some point in their lives. The issue of how many people have or will have a mental illness raises two complex issues: how we define an illness and how we count them.

Defining an illness is a particularly tricky conceptual point and this is usually discussed as if it is an issue particular to psychiatry and psychology that doesn’t effect ‘physical medicine’ but it is actually a concern that is equally pressing in all types of poor health.

The most clear-cut definition of an illness is usually given as an infectious disease that can be diagnosed with a laboratory test. For example, you either have the bacteria or you don’t.

However, you will acquire lots of new bacteria that will continue to live in your body, some of which ’cause problems’ and others that don’t. So the decision rests not on the presence or absence of new bacteria, but on how we define what it means for one type to be ‘causing a problem’. This is the central point of all definitions of illness.

For example, when are changes in heart function enough for them to be considered ‘heart disease’? Perhaps we judge them on the basis of their knock-on effects, but this raises the issue of what consequences we think are serious, and when we should consider them serious enough to count. Death within weeks, clearly, death within two years, maybe, but is still this the case if it occurs in a 90 year-old?

The idea of a personal change ‘causing a problem’ is also influenced by culture as it relies on what we value as part of a fulfilling life.

In times gone past, physical differences that caused sexual problems might only have been considered an illness if they prevented someone from having children. A man who had children, wanted no more, but was unable to have recreational sex with his wife due to physical changes might be considered unlucky but not ill.

The idea of normal sexual function was different, and so the concept of abnormality and illness were also different.

The same applies to mental illness. What we consider an illness depends on what we take for being normal and what someone has the ‘right’ to expect from life.

The fact that the concept of depression as an illness has changed from only something that caused extreme disability (‘melancholy madness’) to something that prevents you from being content is likely due to the fact that, as a society, we have agreed that we have a right to expect that we enjoy our lives. There was no such expectation in the past.

The problem of correctly diagnosing an illness is a related problem. After we have decided on the definition of an illness, there is the issue of how reliably we can detect it – how we fit observations of the patient to the definition.

This is a significant issue for psychiatry, which largely relies on changes in behaviour and subjective mental states, but it also affects other medical specialities.

Contrary to popular belief, most ‘physical’ illness are not diagnosed with lab tests. As in psychiatry, while lab tests can help the process (by excluding other causes or confirming particular symptoms) the majority of diagnoses of all types are made by what is known as a ‘clinical diagnosis’.

This is no more than a subjective judgement by a doctor that the signs and symptoms of a patient amount to a particular illness.

For example, the diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis depends on the doctor making a judgement that the mixture of subjectively reported symptoms by the patient and objective observations on the body amount to the condition.

The key test of whether a illness can be counted is how reliably this process can be completed – or, in other words, whether doctors consistently agree on whether patients have or don’t have the condition.

This is more of an issue for psychiatry because diagnosis relies more heavily on the patient’s subjective experience, but it is wrong to think that bodily observations are necessarily more reliable.

For example, the Babinski response is where the toes curl upward after the plantar reflex is tested by stroking the bottom of the foot. It is commonly used by neurologists to test for damage to the upper motor neurons but it is remarkably unreliable. In fact, neurologists agree on whether it is present at a far lower rate than would be acceptable for the diagnosis of a mental illness or psychiatric symptom.

The problem of reliably diagnosing a condition is relatively easy to overcome, however, as agreement is easy to test and refine. The problem of what we consider an illness is a deeper conceptual issue and this is the essence of the debates over how many people have a mental illness.

The ‘1 in 4’ figures seems to have been mostly plucked out of the air. If this seems too high an estimate, you may be surprised to learn that studies on how many people qualify for a psychiatry diagnosis suggest it is too low.

There is actually no hard evidence for one in four – or any other number – because there’s never been any research looking at the overall lifetime rates of mental illness in Britain. The closest thing we’ve had is the Psychiatric Morbidity Survey, run by the Office of National Statistics. The latest survey, done in 2007, found a rate of about one in four, 23%, but this asked people whether they’d suffered symptoms in the past week (for most disorders).

We don’t know what the corresponding rate for lifetime illness is, although it must be higher. Several such studies have been done in other English speaking countries, however. The most recent major survey of the US population found an estimated lifetime rate of no less than 50.8%. Another study in Dunedin, New Zealand, found that more than 50% of the people there had suffered from mental illness at least once by the age of 32.

Psychiatry has a tendency for ‘diagnosis creep’ where unpleasant life problems are increasingly defined as medical disorders, partly due to pressure from drug companies who develop compounds that could genuinely help non-medical problems. The biggest market is the USA where most drugs are dispensed via insurance claims and insurance companies demand an official diagnosis to fund the drugs, hence, pressure to create new diagnoses from companies and distressed people.

Whenever someone criticises a diagnosis as being unhelpful a common response is to suggest the critic has no compassion for the people with the problem or that they are wanting to deny them help.

The most important issue is not whether people are suffering or whether there is help available to them, but whether medicine is the best way of understanding and assisting people.

Medicine has the potential to do great harm as well as great good and it is not an approach which should be used without seriously considering the risks and benefits, both in terms of the individual and in terms of how it shifts our society’s view of ourselves and the share of responsibility for dealing with personal problems.

So when you hear figures that suggest that ‘1 in 4’ or ‘50%’ of people will have a mental illness in their lifetime, question what this means. The figure is often used to try and destigmatise mental illness but the most powerful bit of The Guardian article shows that this is not necessary:

People who experience mental illness often face stigma and discrimination, and it’s right to oppose this. But stigma is wrong whether the rate of mental illness is one in four, or one in 400. We shouldn’t need statistics to remind us that mental illness happens to real people. By saying that mental health problems are nothing to be ashamed of because they’re common, one in four only serves to reinforce the assumption that there’s something basically shameful about being “abnormal”.

If you want more background on the ‘1 in 4’ figure or discussion about how we understand what is mental illness and who has it, an excellent three part series on Neuroskeptic tackled exactly this point.

Link to ‘How true is the one-in-four mental health statistic?’
Parts one two and three of excellent Neuroskeptic series

Indiana Gazette (Ula Ilnytzky)

Zahi Hawass, secretary general of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, said Wednesday he had a wish list of objects he wants returned. He singled out several museums, including the St. Louis Art Museum, which he said has a 3,200-year-old mummy mask that was stolen before the museum acquired it.

“We’re going to fight to get these unique artifacts back,” Hawass said at the New York preview of the “Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs,” an exhibition that has traveled to five other U.S. cities and London.

Last week, he said, he turned over to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security “all the evidence that I have to prove that this mask was stolen, and we have to bring it back.”

On Wednesday, St. Louis Art Museum spokeswoman Jennifer Stoffel, said the institution “had correspondence with Hawass in 2006 and 2007 and has not heard anything on the matter since.”

abc local (Sandra Bookman)

With video of exhibitin preview.

For the first time in more than three decades, King Tut is back in New York. And this time around, we know a lot more about the ancient boy king.

It’s the last stop of an eight-city tour, and this new Tut exhibit has already been seen by 7 million visitors.

But curators say the New York stop, at the Discovery Times Square Exposition, features more new artifacts in a larger space, and they’re promising you’ve never seen the boy king like this.

King Tut, whose golden treasures last captivated New York and the world 31 years ago, has returned.

And organizers of the exhibition “Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs” are promising a show that’s even bigger and better the second time around.

“This one has 130 artifacts, 50 of which are from Tutankhamun,” curator Dr. David Silverman said. “In actuality, they are two and a half times the size of last time.”

New York Times (Edward Rothstein)

There has always been something a little disorienting, almost out of proportion, about King Tut. Is there any Egyptian pharaoh now more widely known, any more celebrated? The extraordinary objects found in his tomb have been viewed by millions, and the more objects from that horde are seen, the larger Tut looms. Yet the more we know, the less imposing he becomes, and the more puzzling the contrast seems.

Visit “Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs,” which opens on Friday at the Discovery Times Square Exposition, and if you have ever been astonished by the objects found in the king’s tomb — whether from seeing Tut’s first museum tour in the 1970s, or this more wide-ranging show in one of its six preceding locations — you will be amazed again. (New York is its last stop before the artifacts return to Egypt in January.)

This show expands the historical horizon of the ground-breaking blockbuster that was Tut I by linking the king to his ancestors (and, incidentally, enshrining the now dominant spelling of his name). It also breaks with the museological origins of that first tour, which took shape under the oversight of Thomas Hoving, then director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Heritage Key (Helen Atkinson)

For me, the press preview of the Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs exhibition, which opened in New York today, was a momentous event because I’ve never met Dr. Zahi Hawass before, and I got to look him in the eye and shake his hand and even ask him a question. I’ll come to all that in a minute.

The exhibition is impressive. I can’t deny that. There was a moment when I actually stopped dead in my tracks, mouth open (soon to be hustled out of the way by a pushy New York journo). This happened when I came upon a huge bust of Akhenaten, King Tut’s autocratic probable Dad, high, high atop a great slab of honeyed stone, lit with a powerful spotlight, his face astonishingly realistic, the lips curved, cruel, sensual. I felt like Shelley’s “traveler from an antique land” finding the ruined statue of King Ozymandias in the desert.

The exhibition’s website is at
http://www.kingtut.org/home

So often after asking a patient how they have been doing with their home stretches and exercises, they reply: “Oh yeah, I haven’t been doing them as much as I’m supposed to.”

One of the problems is this- he or she gets out of pain and tends to forget about doing them. The exercises, stretches, or our traction neck pillow may get you out of pain quickly, but that doesn’t mean you should stop using them. To really make change in the spine more permanent you need to continue with all of these things. If someone comes to see me that’s had neck pain or back pain for one year, the research shows it could take one year to get out of that pain and correct the problem. It depends on the severity and length of time the problem has been going on.

Once one relieves their neck pain they can cut back on their neck exercises, but still do them once in awhile. One of the reasons is that there are constant stressors on our neck- working at a computer all day, general stress, gravity …

One of the best ways to remember your neck stretches or exercises is to make it part of your daily routine, or habit! For example, do them every morning after you get out of the shower, do them in the shower, do them at work before your day gets going …

If you do them regularly they start to become habit. So even after you get out of pain, it’s a good idea to do some simple stretches and exercises to prevent future injury. It will only take a couple of minutes and is very important for your health. Don’t neglect your body, or it starts neglecting you!

Visit Arc4life.com for your online selection of cervical support neck pillows, orthopedic pain relief products and Home traction units. Products for pain relief. Bookmark this on Delicious Stumble It!

Found under: Samsung, Wave, S8500, Bada, ,

Samsungs first bada smartphone the Wave S8500 was announced back at MWC 2010 but it still hasnt made it to stores yet. Most importantly it looks like the device will be pushed back to June in the UK and we have no idea why Samsung decided to postpone the launch. While this bada OS might not be the talk of the town its still a more than dependable smartphone and it also happens to be the first bada phone coming from Samsung. The Wave S8500 comes with a Super AMOLED touchscreen dis

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